28 Days Later - A future horror classic in the style of a docudrama

Rating: 9/10 (24 November 2006)

Review  '28 days Later' His fear began when he woke up alone. His terror began when he realised he wasn't.
The film starts when a group of animal rights activists who have broken into a research facility let out of a cage a monkey that is infected with a contagious virus despite the begging of the scientist in charge of operations. Transmitted in a drop of blood and devastating within seconds, the virus locks those infected into a permanent state of murderous rage. The virus spreads from one monkey 28 days later, Jim wakes up from a coma in hospital to find London completely deserted. He meets up with some other uninfected people and the film follows them as they fight for survival on their search for a sanctuary. They pick up a broadcast on a radio coming from a military encampment near Manchester so they go north but little do they realise that it is not only a deadly virus that threatens them.
The beginning of the film, when Jim wakes up to find London's streets trashed and completely deserted is extremely powerful. An extremely eerie atmosphere is created through imagery alone as there is little dialogue. It is obvious that complete chaos has taken place in the 28 days between the virus escaping and Jim waking up. The previous scene in which the animal rights activists release the monkey is a very frantic one which makes the eerie quietness of the following scene all the more effective. The exteriors of the streets of London were shot in the early hours of the morning on weekdays. The crew only had a couple of minutes each day, and crew members had to politely ask clubbers not to walk onto the streets. Most of the film was made using digital cameras to give it the real look (the final scenes in the cottage were shot on 35mm film). An added benefit of the digital filming was that the London shots could be set up and executed much quicker than otherwise possible which helped the filmmakers exploit very tight time windows to complete the scenes of an empty London. The music in this scene fits well as does the music for the duration of most of the film. In a lot of horror films I feel that scary music is overly used but it is not here. Another thing that I liked about '28 Days Later' was the fact that the surnames of Jim, Selena, Mark, Frank, and Hannah are never revealed, either during the film or in the credits. Likewise, the names of Jim's parents are never revealed. In a post-apocalypse situation surnames have little use as there are so few survivors your first name is likely to be unique to you.
When the characters reach the military encampment is where Danny Boyle cleverly turns an apocalyptic movie into a study of the human race: can the people who are supposedly meant to protect us be actually worse than the ones who have fallen to a devastating plague? The answer, quite simply, turns out to be yes. That this makes Jim do a much needed transition from dazed youth to fierce survivor drives the point home even more: Rage wiped out most of the population, as a virus, but in given circumstances, is found quite well within us, and Jim becomes so filled with it at one climactic sequence it takes Selena a second before realising that he hasn't yet been infected.
Overall I thought that this film had a tight, gripping storyline despite a few loopholes and the acting was powerful and convincing. This film conveys strong feelings of sadness, isolation, emptiness and helplessness which are all closely associated with rage.
Overall rating = 9/10